Cocaine (28 page)

Jorge and the Wizard, both smartly dressed in suits, smiled at Fortescue and he made a little bow of his head in deference to us.

Jeavons bounded out to meet us, rubbing his hands together nervously.

‘Hello, old chap’, he said. ‘I mean, hello
George
.’

‘Hello
John’
, I replied. ‘Take one of these would you?’

‘Of course. Gentlemen?’

Jeavons waved us towards the science block, which we reached through the iron gates and the damp foliage of the old oaks that lined the car park.

It was almost eleven o’clock – I could tell from the clock-tower down the road, the one that chimed every fifteen minutes – and everyone was either in a lecture, if they were an undergraduate, or busy at work, or possibly waiting for the pub to open. I needed a drink, I realized, as I followed the Wizard and Jorge and Jeavons through the main door and up the flight of stairs to our special research section.

Jeavons took us into his office and pulled up three chairs. We left the four empty suitcases outside.

‘Your name is
John
?’ asked the Wizard.

‘That’s right’, said Jeavons. ‘John Paul.’

The Wizard smiled. ‘You have the merchandise here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Show it to him’, I said, ‘only when he gives me that briefcase.’

The Wizard winced slightly, as if we were slighting his character, but he undid the leather strap that bound it to his wrist and handed the briefcase over to me.

‘I think I can trust you’, he said, nodding to Jorge. ‘Now, if you please?’

‘Yes.’

Jeavons got up and walked out to the fridges. There were four in a row and we had the rights to the two on the left which were carrying something equivalent in value to the dollars in the briefcase.

‘We must perform a further quick test. We choose two bags at random, and sample them. Yes?’

‘That’s fine’ I replied, as Jorge cut open one of the two-pound bags with a tiny penknife and dipped his finger in. He nodded.

‘
Es lo mismo
. It's the same.'

The Wizard nodded and Jorge, the multi-talented accountant pulled another bag out from the second fridge, from right at the back, sliced it neatly open and tasted it. Then he snorted a little from his thumbnail.

‘
La berraquerra
’, he said, making the Wizard nod.

‘He says it is good.’

‘Great. Shall we help you pack?’

I noticed that Jeavons had locked the briefcase in his office.

‘You try’, said the Wizard to me. I shrugged. Why not? I pulled out a cut-down straw from a children’s party packet and took one of the little lines that Jorge had made.

‘Good, yes?’ asked the Wizard. ‘You feel proud?’

‘I do’, said Jeavons. ‘Best bloody stuff on the market, this. You guys’ll make a fortune.

‘Yes’, said the Wizard. ‘I think you may be right. How soon before you can get me another hundred kilos?’

‘
Another
? I thought you said not to flood -’

‘I will take it elsewhere in Europe. I have a jet, you see. Customs is very forgiving. They do not ever check me.’

I looked at Jeavons and he shrugged. He still didn’t know much we had in the briefcase because I hadn’t had a chance to tell him. They still had Kieran downstairs in the Wizard’s limo. I bent down to have another line to give myself time to think about it. He wanted more. The Wizard wanted more. It felt like we were about to follow him to Oz, down the yellow brick road.

‘Have another line’, he said. I needed more time to think so I obliged.

Just as I bent down with the straw to my nose, the line in front of me, I heard the unmistakeable voice of Professor Warmington.

‘Jacobs? Jeavons? Could one of you kindly explain to me what is going on here and who these two gentlemen are?’

I stopped myself mid-line and looked up at him. I sniffed and wiped my nose. Jeavons looked sheepishly at me. It was obvious what we were doing. Jorge was in the middle of packing two-pound bags of pure synthetic cocaine into the Samsonite suit-cases. I had half a line of coke sitting somewhere on my upper lip and a pile of the stuff on the desk in front of me. We had a briefcase containing two million dollars sitting in Jeavons’s office not ten feet away. I couldn’t introduce my two guests as the Wizard and Jorge.

‘Who’s this?’ the Wizard asked me.

‘Professor Sir Roger Warmington. He’s…he’s…’

‘Your
jefe
? Your boss’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Good morning’, said the Wizard, stepping forward and bowing to Warmington. ‘You have fine facilities here.’

Warmington tried to edge closer to the cocaine, but the Wizard blocked his path, a smile never leaving his lips.

‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘What do you think it is?

‘You know bloody well what I think it is and this is
my
facility.’

‘I used to own a facility like this.’

‘Really? Where?’

‘Colombia.’

‘Christ.’

‘May we have a private discussion, Professor? You see, I was thinking of endowing the college with something special, such as a new laboratory.’

Warmington looked at Jeavons and then at me.

‘Don’t move’, he said, and then turned to the Wizard. ‘We can go to my office. And tell your man to stop packing up whatever he’s packing up.’

‘Naturally.’

‘I could call the porters you know.’

The Wizard’s smile, if it were possible, became even broader.

Jorge finished packing the bags into the suitcases and locked them. The Wizard and Warmington had still not come back. His office was on another floor. Jeavons kept looking towards the office where the briefcase was sitting.

‘We must take these to the car’, said Jorge, handing Jeavons and I a suitcase each. ‘We go, now!’

Jeavons looked at me for guidance. I picked up a suitcase.

Kieran was relieved to see us, but not as relieved as I was to have got the evidence out of the laboratory and safely into the large trunk of the limousine.

‘Is there any more?’ I asked Jeavons.

‘Listen, Jacobs. I followed the plan, remember?’

‘What about the stuff on the desk?’

‘I wiped it.’

‘So we’re clean?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do we tell Warmington?’

‘Depends what the Wizard’s told him.’

As if on cue, the Wizard appeared through the trees carrying a large Tower Records plastic bag. He walked swiftly towards us. Jorge whispered something to him and the Wizard nodded, then turned to me and reached for my hand.

‘Mr Jacobs’, he said. ‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you.’

I took his hand and shook it.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I think you will have no problem with the professor.’

‘No?’

‘Absolutely not. I took the liberty of making a donation to the college, for which the professor appeared most grateful.’

‘Donation?’

Jorge opened the door and Kieran stepped out, still in his blue-tinted sunglasses. The Wizard and Jorge quickly stepped inside and the engine started. The rear window whirred down and the Wizard’s face appeared.

‘I’ll be in touch’, he said as the car reversed past the three of us, turned and headed smoothly out through the college gates.

30

I had never seen so many police cars in my life. They came from all over Cambridgeshire, the black marias, the squad-cars, the large white vans with the metal grilles to cover the windows. The policemen inside them were not the slightly-overweight type that wandered around the city centre armed with nothing more than truncheons. The policemen that converged on the college, the science laboratories and in particular Professor Warmington’s office were tall, muscular and wore a uniform scowl. They also wore bullet-proof vests and carried sophisticated rifles and sub-machine-guns. There were two plain-clothes detectives and someone whom I assumed was from MI5 who stood in the corner and stared at me in what a policeman would have described as a peculiar way. I felt like I was back in Colombia.

Jeavons had found Warmington’s body, slumped forward on his desk, a bullet in the back of the head.

‘Execution’, said a copper. ‘Professional hit. You found him?’

‘Yes’, said Jeavons nervously, looking to me and Kieran for support.

‘That your room?’ asked another one, pointing at Jeavons’s room.

‘Yes.’

‘Keys?’

‘No-one’s been in there but me.’

‘
Keys
.’

Jeavons, Kieran and I exchanged nervous glances. The money was in there. Jeavons had hidden it behind the rear panel of the small refrigerator by his desk, still in its briefcase.

‘I couldn’t open it’, he’d told us, ten minutes before.

‘Why did you call the police, you idiot?’

‘There was an undergrad – a girl. She saw me with the body. I didn’t want her to think I did it so I called the police.’

I could see them talking to her now, the small, bespectacled mousy-haired girl in the white coat. Hopefully she was telling them the same story as Jeavons. Kieran, Jeavons and I were being held in a side room. Kieran’s presence could be explained easily: a friend come to visit. Jeavons and I worked here. The problem was that Kieran and I had criminal records, albeit in Canada and Colombia respectively, and Jeavons had found the body.

‘
Not a trace’, Jeavons whispered to me. ‘We’re clean.’

I breathed out. The three of us watched as an unarmed man in surgical gloves carefully unlocked and then walked into Jeavons’ room. He looked at the desk, opened the drawer with a tiny key from the chain and pulled out my note-book, the one I’d put together in Colombia and annotated in Cambridge. I stiffened as I watched him open the psychaedelic cover and pore over my illegible shorthand. He rested the book down on the desk and walked to the refrigerator. It was locked and so he had to find another key on the chain in order to open it.

***

The small private jet took off from RAF Duxford with special diplomatic clearance. From the side window, sipping a glass of
aguardiente
, Felicio Suares looked down at Cambridge’s medieval centre as the Gulfstream banked for the second time. King’s College Chapel was visible as was the meandering River Cam winding along the Backs. Suares felt sorry that they had not had more time to sightsee, perhaps Trinity College and its Wren Fountain, and he had always been intrigued by the Mathematical Bridge that, if his memory served him well, was to be found at Queens’. Jorge sat behind him in a large leather armchair with the four Samsonite cases taking up the two seats next to him. Jorge was hunched over the coffee table re-counting the two million dollars that Suares had transplanted from the briefcase to the big plastic Tower Records bag after shooting Professor Warmington in the back of the head.

The flight was scheduled for two hours exactly, from one small airport to another. The Gulfstream jet would touch down at Cannes-Mandelieu and then a car would be waiting to whisk Suares and his accountant to his villa in the hills, which, incidentally, was next door to that of the dictator of a well-known Middle Eastern country that had just emerged from the wreckage of a bitter war in the Gulf. From Cannes, the distribution network that Suares had set up in Continental Europe during the last two years with the Cartels and just before his retirement would transform one hundred kilos of cocaine into two hundred kilos which, through sub-distributors and sub-sub-distributors would sell at the price of between fifty to one hundred dollars a gram, equating to an average value of seventy-five thousand dollars a kilo and a total of fifteen million dollars, of which Suares would receive half, and Jorge a mere hundred thousand.